The Ukraine War did not take place

Applied Baudrillardian hyperreality

This is a post about the simulated nature of modern political reality, especially involving war.

“All those journalists who set themselves up as bearers of the universal conscience, all those presenters who set themselves up as strategists, all the while overwhelming us with a flood of useless images. Emotional blackmail by massacre, fraud. Instead of discussing the threshold of social tolerance for immigration we would do better to discuss the threshold of mental tolerance for information. With regard to the latter, we can say that it was deliberately crossed.” - Jean Baudrillard

I recently re-watched Wag the Dog (1997) after a couple decades, which I reviewed here (along with some scenes from the dreadful The West Wing as a counterpoint). In the film black operatives concoct a fake war to distract from the president’s sex scandal at the peak of election season. Their media allies build an entire narrative out of thin air, creating a closed feedback loop and snowball effect between media-government-spook state to achieve the desired result. It was a powerful film with an important dissident message, and real life events shortly thereafter mimicked it when Bill Clinton distracted from his own sex scandal by bombing Afghanistan and Sudan. The Atlantic summed up the film’s message well in it’s review:

It’s a common trope in films and shows about politics: the one person, standing up to the Hollywood-produced machinery of Washington. The individual, fighting for authenticity in a political culture that wants nothing more than to be fake. What Wag the Dog suggests, though, is something both gentler and infinitely more cynical: Here, there is no one to push back. Here, there is no one to stand up for authenticity or truth or the empowerment of the individual. Here, it’s all a production; we citizens double as audiences. And the thing of it is that, in the movie’s dark vision, there is no difference between the two.

To me, the film raised the questions: is there a limit to elite propaganda? Does it have to be based in reality at all, especially in the modern era? Under what circumstances does it need to be based in reality, or at least to adjust itself to feedback received from the audience/masses? It’s a really interesting question and one worth exploring.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) explored this question in his short book the gulf war did not take place (1991). The book is stupidly expensive ($30.00 on Amazon) even though it clocks in at less than a hundred pages, apparently because it had a limited print run, although there are lots of free versions online such as here. I found it to be poorly written and poorly argued, meandering, unstructured and disjointed (to which

Dr. Monzo

agrees) in a typical French style. I also tried reading his travelogue America (1986) but it was even more poorly written and essentially unreadable dreck, although I gave it a fair chance. Regardless, the particular ideas he explores in gulf war are worth commenting on.

Baudrillard. I feel neutral toward his physiognomy.

Baudrillard is most well known for his Simulacra and Simulation (1981) where he introduced the ideas that he would later explore in the gulf war and which inspired The Matrix. It was better than America but worse than gulf war¹;

THE LETHAL TEXT

liked it better than I did. In the book Baudrillard referenced the term simulacrum, where in his formulation there are four stages of reality: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretense of reality (i.e. masking that there is no reality); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever" which is also known as hyperreality. This is an example of what he means by the four stages:

Baudrillard associates each of those distortions of reality with periods of increasing technical sophistication:

1. Stage one and two: Associated with the premodern period, it’s representation is an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as real and signification gropes towards this reality.

2. Stage three: Associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as "real" as its prototype.

3. Stage four: Associated with the postmodernity of late capitalism where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.

We are currently deeply enmeshed in Baudrillard’s conception of stage four and can see it’s manifestation in all sorts of ways. In all of the following cases the relationship between the underlying event, if one even exists, and the hyperreality created are entirely different things: the created hyperreality both supplants actual reality and then morphs actual reality into something totally different. Examples can be seen in advertising (the Bud Light tranny controversy comes to mind), in media narratives which are deployed for political purposes and then vanish once their use is over (Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes bragged about this²), after 9/11 where we stayed in Afghanistan for twenty years to wash money out of the U.S. taxpayer basis back into the hands of the transnational security elite and to control the world’s heroin production while invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam even though he had nothing to do with it, in the COVID narrative where the entire hysteria around it was concocted for political reasons and then discarded (including the creepy dancing fake nurses), in the stock market which is held up by unlimited Federal Reserve monetary printing despite it no longer bearing any relation between profitability and stock market prices. We can even see it in the establishment’s reaction to the 1/6 protests which were called an attempt to overthrow the government even though it was FBI-led and initiated (and they had a fake bomb plot as a backup in case it didn’t work), no one died other than a protester, Ashley Babbitt, no weapons were involved, and there was no way to transition a protest at the capitol into seizing political power. In this sense, Baudrillard argues, we live in a hyperreality which results from the fusion of the virtual and the real into a third order of reality. As Baudrillard argues in his article on the 1989 Romanian revolution, the indignant attempt to maintain a moral defense against the principle of simulation which governs all forms of representation misses the point: “The image and information are subject to no principle of truth or reality.” What matters to our elites is controlling the production and interpretation of information in a given context. The MAGA right unfortunately seem to totally fail to understand this point and engage with the simulation on it’s own terms, per

Academic Agent

where he argues that “[the online right are] entirely consumed by Baudrillard’s simulation and engages almost totally in surrogate activities in lieu of real politics.”

What is real anymore?

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The Gulf War did not take place

This also happened during the Gulf War, which was perhaps the first full manifestation of a created hyperreality during war. While prior wars were heavily manipulated and controlled - I think of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Vietnam war in general, or FDR’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor (which he pushed Japan into by cutting off their access to oil) - but the Gulf War was the first war which allowed the instantaneous media-government-spook state feedback mechanisms that allowed for hyperreality to manifest itself:

It was not the first time that images of war had appeared on TV screens, but it was the first time that they were relayed “live” from the battlefront. It was not the first occasion on which the military censored what could be reported, but it did involve a new level of military control of reportage and images. Military planners had clearly learnt a great deal since Vietnam: procedures for controlling the media were developed and tested in the Falklands, Grenada and Panama. As a result, what we saw was for the most part a “clean” war, with lots of pictures of weaponry, including the amazing footage from the nose-cameras of “smart bombs,” and relatively few images of human casualties, none from the Allied forces. In the words of one commentator, for the first time, “the power to create a crisis merges with the power to direct the movie about it…Desert Storm was the first major global media crisis orchestration that made instant history.”

Here, it was not a war at all: Saddam was tricked into invading Kuwait by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie (the above L.A. Times article hints at the confusion and fog-of-war around the underlying incident, which should tell you all you need to know about the actual reality), Iraq had no ability to fight against the vastly technologically superior air forces of the United States, and the U.S. killed up to 100,000 people without suffering almost any casualties of their own - in other words, it was a one sided massacre initiated by the United States! Yet it was called a “war” and hyped up as a “war” despite having nothing to do with the underlying reality. Then the U.S. stood idly by as Saddam brutally crushed incipient rebellions by the Shia and Kurds under his rule and re-established his control - what kind of war was this exactly? “State-of-the-art military power is now virtual in the sense that it is deployed in an abstract, electronic and informational space, and in the sense that its primary mechanism is no longer the use of force. Virtual war is therefore not simply the image or imaginary representation of real war, but a qualitatively different kind of war, the effects of which include the suppression of war in the old sense.” And:

The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual, according to which no available weapon will not one day be used and such a concentration of force cannot but lead to conflict. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.

Demolished vehicles line Highway 80, also known as the "Highway of Death", the route fleeing Iraqi forces took as they retreated from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm.

Here, the progress of the hyperreal war is measured not by objective war achievements but by it’s ability to hold the public’s attention, to draw ratings:

The media promote the war, the war promotes the media, and advertising competes with the war. Promotion is the most thick-skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict. It is our Last Judgment. But it is also like a biological function: it devours our substance, but it also allows us to metabolize what we absorb, like a parasitic plant or intestinal flora, it allows us to turn the world and the violence of the world into a consumable substance. So, war or promotion?

The war, along with the fake and presumptive warriors, generals, experts and television presenters we see speculating about it all through the day, watches itself in a mirror: am I pretty enough, am I operational enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage?….

In the absence of the (greatly diminished) will to power, and the (problematic) will to knowledge, there remains today the widespread will to spectacle, and with it the obstinate desire to preserve its spectre or fiction.

The purpose of the spectre is to produce “consensus by flat encephalogram. The complement of the unconditional simulacrum in the field is to train everyone in the unconditional reception of broadcast simulacra. Abolish any intelligence of the event. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity. And if people are vaguely aware of being caught up in this appeasement and this disillusion by images, they swallow the deception and remain fascinated by the evidence of the montage of this war with which we are inoculated everywhere: through the eyes, the senses and in discourse.” We are ultimately responsible for this as we desire it, we demand it: “We have neither need of nor the taste for real drama or real war. What we require is the aphrodisiac spice of the multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence, for we have a hallucinogenic pleasure in all things, which, as in the case of drugs, is also the pleasure in our indifference and our irresponsibility and thus in our true liberty. Here is the supreme form of democracy. Through it our definitive retreat from the world takes shape.”

Baudrillard maintains that we do not have the objective information necessary to assess what information the media provides us is real or false even if we wanted to. Therefore, a default high level of suspicion toward any information is appropriate:

The author of The Persian Gulf TV War, Douglas Kellner, recounts his herculean efforts to obtain and cross-check information about the Gulf War. Despite this, his book opens with an admission of failure: he cannot decide conclusively for or against the conspiracy theory according to which the US enticed Iraq to invade Kuwait since “other accounts are also plausible.” It is the desire to avoid this kind of informational aporia which lies behind Baudrillard’s injunction: “Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than the events themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they came…Be meteorologically sensitive to stupidity.” Not only does the real vanish in the virtual through an excess of information, it leaves an archival deposit such that “generations of video-zombies…will never cease reconstituting the event.”…Indeed, the tone and argument of Baudrillard’s essays is entirely directed against the complicity which results from the failure to question the reality and the nature of these events.

This goes back to the importance of having a grounding mechanism by which one can ascertain truth even in light of massive disinformation and propaganda. There are at least two such mechanisms: (1) the scientific method where results can be repeated by third parties and (2) using recursive predictions to gradually refine and update one’s view of the world; the more one is proven wrong about predictions, the more one should refine one’s worldview. This is my preferred approach. Through trial and error, making a fool of oneself, one may achieve clarification about why and how this world actually operates - one will never achieve total understanding or predictive ability, of course; there is always room to grow, but one can get much closer to the truth using this method than one might get otherwise. This is complicated by the fact that paradoxically the more information we receive, the greater the corresponding loss of meaning associated with it.

Clausewitz famously said “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means” but here, simulated war is the politics of persuasion by other means. Who/what was the target? According to Baudrillard it was not Saddam, ultimately, but Islam itself:

The use of force remains carefully circumscribed, a lever of last resort employed only to the extent that is necessary to bring the recalcitrant party into line. The crucial stake in the Gulf affair, Baudrillard argues, was the subordination of Islam to the global order [later continued with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush]: “Our wars thus have less to do with the confrontation of warriors than with the domestication of the refractory forces on the planet…All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order.”

There are other but complimentary ways of looking at our elite’s control mechanisms:

Rurik Skywalker

discusses the Wallerstein theory of geopolitics here where the third world acts basically as slaves and provides the first world with products and natural resources for consumption, and Julian Assange’s perspective that the third world goes through a three phase process of integration into the global world order, which I will cover in a separate post:

1. Install a strongman who will supervise the implementation of a security state to suppress populism,

2. Develop industry within the nation to assist in suppressing economic unrest further, and

3. Transition from/overthrow the strongman so the country can be controlled via neoliberal debt practices.

The speed of transition from one step to the next depends on the particular characteristics of each nation, and sometimes there are failed transition attempts (such as Egypt reverting to El Sisi after our elites overthrew Mubarak and installed the Muslim Brotherhood). Because dictators do not understand how this process works, they are surprised when their former benefactors viciously turn on them and destroy them: Saddam, who was backed by the West for many decades to fight Iran, was very surprised to be given the green light to invade Kuwait by the U.S. and then backstabbed.

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The Ukraine War did not take place

This brings us around to the Ukraine war. I’ve covered it twice before in May 2023 and February 2024 and I think they hold up quite well if you decide to read them, but basically it is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s conception of hyperreality, touched on briefly in this UnHerd post. The real objectives of the war are nothing like the official explanations for it, and the information allowed out of the conflict zone has been and remains tightly constricted on both sides. There are basically no reporters allowed in the area and our elites murdered Gonzalo Lira (whose understanding was lousy) for even trying to report from Kharkiv. There’s a bunch of gore porn released of drones murdering hapless Russian soldiers, but other than that the information released is incredibly propagandized and distorted. Some of the best information which

Rurik Skywalker

covered was from Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary outfit Wagner, who complained that the Ministry of Defense was sending his soldiers to die in frontal assaults against heavily fortified positions without sufficient artillery or other support, until he too was murdered, and also from the Russian patriot Igor Strelkov, who was thrown in prison for asking razor-sharp questions about the nature of the war on a nonsensical pretext. Now very little information that isn’t approved by either Russia (where Putin is a globohomo lackey) or from the West reaches the public. Have any of you guys following Simplicius gotten tired of the ridiculous hopium coverage promising Russian victory at-any-moment even as the war drags to year four and even as Ukraine has invaded Russia and is utilizing state-of-the-art Western arms after breaching Russia’s fifteenth or whatever red line with no response? Baudrillard is directly on point about the pundits on both sides:

While one fraction of the intellectuals and politicians, specialists in the reserve army of mental labour, are whole-heartedly in favor of the war, and another fraction are against it from the bottom of their hearts, but for reasons no less disturbing, all are agreed on one point: this war exists, we have seen it. There is no interrogation into the event itself or its reality; or into the fraudulence of this war, the programmed and always delayed illusion of battle; or into the machination of this war and its amplification by information, not to mention the improbable orgy of material, the systemic manipulation of data, the artificial dramatisation…If we do not have practical intelligence about the war (and none among us has), at least let us have a skeptical intelligence toward it, without renouncing the pathetic feeling of its absurdity.

But there is more than one kind of absurdity: that of the massacre and that of being caught up in the illusion of massacre. It is just as in La Fontaine’s fable: the day there is a real war you will not even be able to tell the difference. The real victory of the simulators of war is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation.

As Rurik’s tagline states, “The wars are fake, but the massacres are real.” Our elites own both Russia and the West, and it has multiple goals for the Ukraine war none of which are publicly acknowledged.³ We can see, then, that the media information provided in this “war” is heavily managed and controlled, and the propaganda fed to the public has very little or nothing to do with the underlying reality, which is meant as a winless grind-fest to maximize casualty rates on both sides. Welcome to hyperreality.

I hope that you’ve found this post helpful as you navigate trying to determine what is real and what is fake. I suggest you adopt a grounding mechanism if you don’t have one already - my recommendation is recursive prediction - because without one you will be forever blowing in the winds of whatever fake elite narratives they decide to throw at you.

To end on a positive note, as Baudrillard wrote, “the more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced, the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.”

Thanks for reading.

1. I got carried away with the concept of hyperreality when I came across it and bought three of Baudrillard’s books at the same time, which in retrospect I regret because he’s such a terrible writer.

Dr. Monzo

argues that he was writing in the style he was describing.

HamburgerToday

believes that Baudrillard’s style is “counter-seductive.”

2. Rhodes gave a rare look into the process of creating media echo chambers to further policy goals, bragging about how adept the administration was in building a circular reporting echo chamber to increase support for the 2007 Iranian nuclear deal: 

“We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” he admitted in the Times interview when asked about the plethora of “experts” praising the deal in the press. The Times article, which will appear in the paper’s Sunday magazine, notes Rhodes, who has a writing degree from NYU, was skilled as a “storyteller.” “He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials,” reporter David Samuels writes. “He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives.” 

Asked about his misleading version of the deal, Rhodes said, “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like [the anti-nuke group] Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked. We drove them crazy,” he said of Republicans and others who opposed the deal, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Rhodes bashed the media for not properly reporting on foreign affairs and revealed how he fed information to reporters such as Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, a respected “Beltway insider,” as the Times called him. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Rhodes’ assistant, Ned Price, gave an example of how they would shape the news by feeding a narrative to their “compadres” in the press corps and letting it echo across social media. “I’ll give them some color,” Price said, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

3. These goals include emptying out the Slavlands and genociding white Christian slavs on both sides, being able to test new weapons of war technologies, using Ukraine as a way to wash many hundreds of billions of dollars out of the U.S. taxpayer basis back into the hands of the transnational security elite, and possibly betraying Putin in accordance with Assange’s three phase process of integration described above in order to be able to more directly exploit Russia’s trillions of dollars worth of natural resources. I go into these reasons in my prior posts above.